Ideas and Strategies for Real-Time Personalization

Traditionally, email marketing has always been the best way to communicate with customers. Have company or product news? Send out an email to let your users know and bring them back your website or app.

While it’s great for reminding them that you exist and what’s new, does it really improve engagement? You’ve heard that email may be dead and it’s no secret that open rates are declining - so let’s take a deeper look at email marketing vs. real-time web personalization.

Email marketing is not in real-time. Emails will most likely get buried in the cluttered inbox of your recipients (especially this time of year). With real-time web personalization, marketers can communicate with customers while they are engaged on your website or app.

Email marketing faces deliverability issues. How do you know that your email messages are making it into the inbox? You don’t. With real-time web personalization, you can test and guarantee that visitors are seeing your messages while they are live on your website or app.

Email marketing competes against every other email in a person’s inbox. If an email doesn’t immediately jump out at your recipients or require action, it’s safe to say it’s a goner with the delete button. Real-time web personalization allows marketers to deliver relevant and dynamic messages based on visitor behavior.

Email is popular! Email marketing is hastily increasing in popularity and volume, but effectiveness remains low. It’s time to stand out of the crowd and do something different. It’s time to think about real-time web personalization.

How does it work? Real-time web personalization is behavior-based. It has a powerful rules engine to provide personalization at a granular, or individual level. At any given time your website or app can recognize exactly who is looking at it. The goal of real-time personalization is to make each visitor feel like your website or customer portal were designed specifically for them. They see the content, language, and offers that are specifically important and interesting to them. Learn more here.

Is email really dead? I don’t think so – although the success rate of email marketing is nowhere as high as people like to think, it can be effective for driving people to your website or app. But if you succeed in driving somewhere to your site, what do your do with them once they get there? How do you personalize their web experience to keep them engaged? Now you have the opportunity to deliver the right content, to the right users, at the most relevant time and place, with in-context messages.

In addition, email marketing and real-time web personalization can complement each other by reinforcing messaging to engage customers and prospects, creating a better online experience. Using both channels, you can capitalize on your marketing programs and optimize the lean marketing funnel!

For more on this topic, join our webinar, “Get More ROI From Your Email With Real-Time Web Personalization,” webinar on Thursday, Nov. 21 at 1pm EST. Register here.